Thank you, WW, for posting these. Holy cow:
A fundamental tenet of plate tectonics theory is that the Earth's surface is divided into rigid plates that move together and apart like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Scientists have long recognized 12 major plates. Now there are 13. ...
There are 12 plates in the world and earthquakes occur when these collide. A 13th plate was created by the breakup of the Indo-Australian plate was documented in 1995. ...
Scientists have known that for some 50 million years, the Indian subcontinent has been pushing northward into Eurasia, forcefully raising the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan Mountains. The new research suggests that starting about 8 million years ago, the accumulated mass became so great that the Indo-Australian Plate buckled and broke under the stress. ...
"In the Central Indian Ocean, Nature is conducting a large-scale laboratory experiment for us, showing us what happens to the oceanic lithosphere (Earth's outer layer) when force is applied," Dr. Weissel said in an interview. Essentially pushed into an immovable object, "it can buckle like a piece of tin," he said.
These quotes are from the first link. I was amazed when I saw the maps of the plate boundaries: no wonder New Zealand has so many earthquakes--they're right on top of one of the boundaries. [shiver] Oh, and it gave yet another def. of tsunami: The word "Tsunami" is Japanese for "Harbour Wave". They are often wrongly called "Tidal Waves" and have nothing to do with tides.
The second link opened okay for me, though the images were a bit slow to come up. Ack: until last night, I hadn't seen any pictures that gave me, a person unfamiliar with any of the areas that were hit, sufficient perspective of the size of the wave(s). But one of the news channels showed a video of an incoming one, and only when the camera zoomed in on what I had thought was a small piece of...something, maybe a child's shirt or a hamburger wrapper--did I realize I was seeing a man.
